


in a coat of red or a gown of gold

by openmouthwideeye



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Domestic, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 09:31:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10511022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openmouthwideeye/pseuds/openmouthwideeye
Summary: Her fingers fisted, crumpling the velvet as if it were to blame instead of the man smiling as if he were not.Brienne is most displeased with her current wardrobe. Her husband takes it upon himself to help.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Mikki wanted something cheerful. This . . . probably doesn't qualify.

Brienne pushed into the guest chambers, wincing at the bulk of her velvet skirts. When they caught on the doorframe, they felt like nothing so much as the hands of septas and seamstresses, prodding her as if body and babe belonged to the whole of the Westerlands.

Jaime idled in an ornate rosewood armchair, though it was not yet midday. As she entered, he rose, kicking a wooden hoop under the bed as if by happenstance. Fabric glinted where the needle had speared it.

She scowled. “You needn’t bother hiding it. I spent the better part of the morning with Lady Clifton and her daughters embroidering lions onto every scrap of crimson fabric she could find.”

Her fingers throbbed in half a dozen places where the needle had pierced her. The women of Faircastle seemed to believe that Brienne’s ripening belly had also ripened her to become the Lady Lannister the Westermen had expected. Perhaps Lady Jeyne’s many pregnancies had hardened her to the sight of Brienne’s desperately erected defenses, for her questions were as probing as her needle, for all that she smiled while she stitched. Brienne had spent hours withstanding kind counsel and an unflinching dissection of gore to rival any commander’s tent. She’d finally begged off citing a queasy belly, unease over her polite falsehood souring her stomach in truth.

The acrid taste of sick clung to her tongue as she frowned at the bolt of blue under the bed, cowering from her thick, clumsy fingers. “Has Lady Jeyne requested Tarth’s sunbursts, or is it to be more lions?”

“One might think my lady has no love for her house,” Jaime said lightly, crossing the room to her. His fingers alighted on one hip, his stump on the other. His touch soothed the weight of heavy plum velvet, which stained her hips like a bruise.

“It bears me none,” she grumbled, “but at least our child will be well protected.” She worked her fingers across her palm to ease the aches. “The lions on its swaddling have _claws."_

He laughed, snatching up her fingers. His whiskers itched her skin, but when he pressed kisses across her fingertips, it made no matter. She sighed, contentment warring with the weariness that dogged her steps.

“Apparently Jeyne has grown claws as well.” Weaving their fingers together, he took a step back, regarding her. The borrowed dress fit her shoulders—Lady Jeyne had always been a plump girl, she’d told Brienne cheerily, and motherhood had rounded any edges the gods had not—but Brienne’s swelling breasts were too meagre to fill the bodice, which drooped pitifully over the ribbon that cinched the gown’s high waist. Hastily-sewn scraps of lace tumbled around her ankles, longer in front where her belly hiked the hem.

“The girl I remember would have cowed before an angry lioness, not trussed her up like a prized warhorse set to pasture.” He raised a brow, appraising despite the amusement that warmed his green eyes. “You did not meet me in the yard this morning.”

Her fingers fisted, crumpling the velvet as if it were to blame instead of the man smiling as if he were not. She grimaced, pulling free of his embrace. Lace whispered japes as she lumbered across the room to her trunk. Her fingers were still warm with his touch when she splayed them across her belly, frowning at the slope beneath her palm.

“Brienne?”

Goosepimples erupted at his approach, racing up her arms and prickling her shoulders. His breath exploded across her nape as it had half a hundred times before, some innocent, some not.

A sob hitched her chest, sudden and unexpected.

 _“Brienne?”_ He twisted around her bulk, alarmed as he took in her expression. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.

She jerked her head. “Nothing,” she said, as her next breath arrived like a battering ram. “I’m being foolish.”

“You are,” he agreed shortly. “Tell me what has put that look on your face.”

She retreated, a fruitless attempt to evade the question, but he danced after her, reclaiming the ground she surrendered. Their babe pressed between them as his hand once had, dangling on a ragged cord that bound them together more tightly than they could have dreamed.

Jaime’s smile became grim. “Do I need to shorten our hosts by a head? Jeyne is a childhood friend, of a sort, but if you mislike the gown so greatly . . .”

“The gown is lovely.” She jerked away, feeling foolish. Her skirts lumbered after, clutching at her legs. She swatted them, and a fingernail snagged the fabric, thread trailing her hand like gossamer in a broken web.

“If only you were so convincing with the Targaryen girl,” he retorted, “I might be shorter by a head.”

She faltered, remembering: dragons descending like some remnant of the Long Night; Jaime lunging forward, magnificent and proud; a girl with eyes of purple ice claiming the Mother’s heart for mercy, even as she supplicated the Stranger to drag him to the deepest of the Seven Hells. Brienne had worn skirts then, too, and when words had failed, they had hindered her steps until she feared Jaime’s life may be forfeit.

 _There are no dragons on Fair Isle,_  she reminded herself. Shuddering a breath, she forced away the helplessness that clawed at her breast like a pride of lions prowling across a needle’s point.

“Lady Jeyne is kind,” she said at last. “She resewed one of her favorite gowns for me when— when I— ”

 _Stupid girl,_ she told herself, _how are you to be a mother?_

“When I split my breeches this morning.” She winced, waiting for a laugh, a snort, the ringing blow of a thoughtless jape.

None came. When she braved a glance at Jaime, no mirth softened the line of his jaw.

“You might have told me, Brienne.”

“They’re only breeches. Besides, what could you have done?”

“Forgive me, my lady, I’d forgotten your great skill with a needle and thread.” Jaime’s sharp tongue was as familiar as his touch, written a thousand different ways across her skin: in drawn brows and warm blushes, pressed lips and indelicate snorts of laughter. Today it drew her arms around her belly, as color stormed her cheeks until they blazed.

“I lengthened the laces so I could wrap them twice around.”

“Oh?”

“It worked for a time.” She cast a disgruntled look at the trunk, which held the tunics and doublets and breeches she’d brought to Fair Isle. Perhaps Jaime might wear them once he’d mended the seams. Perhaps she might beg pardon and return to the Rock, where seamstresses did not look scandalized at the suggestion of sewing breeches for the honorable Lady Lannister.

He studied her for a long moment, taking in her rigid posture, the heavy folds of plum velvet, the tangle of lace that itched her ankles.

“Off with that,” he said, waving his stump at her.

“What?”

“The gown.” He sidestepped the bed to dig beneath a chair—the one he’d vacated upon her arrival. “Off.”

“Jaime, I have no garments—”

“Has the babe blocked your ears, my lady?” His voice was muffled by the bed, _not_ her belly, and her fingers clenched as she briefly considered aiming the nearby wash basin at his head.

She huffed instead, bending her arms at an awkward angle to reach the knot. The laces yielded quickly, as if her gown were as eager to be rid of her as she was to be rid of it. She would have gladly left it heaped on the floor, but she spread it across the bed, smoothing away the worst of the wrinkles. Oversolicitous though she may be, Lady Jeyne had been kind, and it would not do to repay her generosity so rudely.

Jaime surfaced with an embroidery hoop in the crook of his arm. He fumbled only slightly as he tied off a thread with fingers and teeth and tugged the pin free. The hoop clattered to the rushes. He caught the fabric before it could follow, bundling it into the pile of cloth he’d fished from beneath the chair.

They were not swaddling clothes, Brienne realized, but a silken doublet and breeches she’d thought the maids had absconded with a sennight past. The breeches were soft, supple with wear, and would not split so easily as the linen pair had that morning.

“I have been looking for those,” she complained.

“And here they are.”

Her jaw worked in soundless frustration. She felt foolish standing there in her smallclothes, even as her husband’s eyes raked up her legs and over her hips, lingering on the cleft where her breasts met her belly. Warmth trailed his gaze, simmering low in her stomach, and she had the sudden, strange thought that this man wanted to divest her of every scrap of fabric she would wear for the rest of her life.

“Jaime,” she tried to admonish, but his name merely hummed in her throat.

“Hush, wench.” Swallowing thickly, he sank to his knees. His breath fanned across her skin, curling around the swell of her stomach like a cloak of protection for the child growing there. “In skirts or breeches, no adversary would dare cross our babe’s mother.” He grinned up at her, green eyes flashing under a fan of golden lashes. “But as you prefer the breeches . . .”

Reaching out, he cupped her ankle, thumb tracing a featherlight pattern on her skin. His palm glided up her calf of its own accord, shifting sideways so he might retrace his path with his fingernails. She shivered, nipples pebbling as the fine hairs on her legs chased his touch.

When she said his name, her voice sounded strangled in her own ears.

“Think you’re too big for your breeches, do you, wench?” It gave her no small pleasure to find that his breathing was as unsteady as her own. He lifted her heel at last, guiding her foot through the opening of her doeskin breeches.

Her hand found his shoulder for balance, and her thumb pressed hard in protest. “Jaime, stop.”

“Don’t tempt me,” he warned, but his tone said plainly that it was far too late for that.

She struggled to focus on the task at hand. “I’m too big around the middle. Even if I don’t split the seams, they’ll slip down around my ankles at the first wrong movement.”

“They can make byrnies to fit Strongboar’s bulk, and I doubt Lord Manderly has ever lost his breeches due to his belly.” His eyes traced the path of freckles anyway, a long, languid look, and by the time she’d recovered her senses he’d gotten her into the other leg. He stood, tugging the breeches up with him.

Brienne huffed a protest, but he was already pinning the fabric with his stump, fumbling with a hidden button, and tying the laces in his smooth, one-handed knot. Finally he stepped back and appraised her, satisfaction writ plain on his smug, handsome face.

The breeches did not split, nor did they fall. Rather than biting into her flesh, the soft leather curved, soft and snug against her skin.

She fell into a fighting stance, heedless of the way his eyes followed her. The doeskin clung to her hips, shifting with her movements, just as it should.

“I added a strip of linen here, and a button there.” Jaime traced the waistband by either hipbone. “You can let out a good handspan of fabric before I’ll need to resew it.” His stump drifted higher, skimming the swell of her breast through the thin linen of her smallclothes, even as his hand retreated to tug the rich blue fabric from his shoulder.

“The doublet will be trickier,” he admitted, thumbing half-finished starbursts on their deep expanse of twilight, “but I think I can manage a proper fit before Lord Farman throws another feast.” Crumpling the silk, he flattened his palm on the breadth of her belly. “I’m afraid there’s no getting around the hauberk, though. Between the padding and the leather . . .” Jaime shook his head, dancing eyes belying his solemn expression. “You’ll need to resign yourself to looking like an auroc—”

She cut him off with a kiss, fingers scrabbling at the button on her breeches, and it wasn’t long at all before Brienne had undone all of her husband’s hard work.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is lovely.


End file.
